Comedian Ernie G learned a quick lesson when he was moving up the comedy ranks.

“When I first started, I would try to do some inspirational stuff,” the comic says. “I hadn’t earned my comedy chops yet. I wasn’t all that funny, and I was trying to be inspirational. Dude, no one wants to be inspired in a comedy club.”

Ernie G — his real name is Ernesto Gritzewsky — then worked his way up the stand-up circuit.

“I just worried about getting funny,” he says. “Then, I got pretty funny!”

He made several appearances on “Que Locos!” — a Spanglish show that aired on Galavision. Later came gigs on BET and Comedy Central and a string of Latin-themed comedy tours around the country for which he served as emcee.

In the back of his mind, however, Ernie always wanted to empower people through humor. Ernie grew up in Los Angeles in the ’80s and was always funny. He memorized the material in Eddie Murphy’s “Delirious” and would perform it for friends using his mom’s pink hairbrush as a microphone. Later, he went to see the comic perform at the Forum in Los Angeles. He remembers it like it was yesterday.

“The curtain rose slowly, and you’d see his silhouette. He was in his old tight leather outfit. Twenty thousand people stood up and screamed at the top of their lungs. I looked at him and thought, ‘I’m gonna do that one day.’ That was the birth of Ernie G.”

First came college, however. But after starting at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, he got kicked out after too much partying and drinking. But the death of a beloved aunt spurred him to return, and he graduated with a degree in psychology and a minor in Chicano studies.

He thought there was a lesson in his story, and he was alarmed by statistics that show that Hispanics lag behind Anglo students in high school graduation rates in California (as reported in a 2012 study by Education Trust-West).

Things came together when he performed for the National Council of La Raza in 2005 and was asked to do 10 minutes of clean comedy. The sound system crashed during his set, so he had to keep performing while they worked on the audio.

“I had no more clean material,” he recalls. “All I had was my blue material and my hoochie-mama jokes. So I decided to share the autobiographical story of my life and make it funny. They responded in droves.”

He eventually eliminated all the edgy material from his set. That included his hilarious, X-rated rendition of the Eydie Gorme standard “Sabor a Mi” with English lyrics (check out Ernie’s early CD “Mama’s Boy” to hear it). But it was part of an overall change in Ernie, who often spends summers working at a camp.

“One time the parents of my summer-camp kids came to see me,” he says. “I’m on stage, cursing up a storm. I could see the look in their eyes: ‘This is my kid’s camp director?’ It didn’t make sense for me to want to be a role model if I wasn’t going to live it in every aspect of my life.”

That doesn’t mean he lacks for topics. He finds a bounty in his background: He calls himself a Mexican-American-Puerto Rican-Russian-French-Catholic-Jew with an LA upbringing.

“I’m proud of the fact that I’m a beautifully educated Latino who has a little ghetto in him,” he says.

His definition of the word “ghetto”: “When you run out of shampoo, do you throw the bottle away or do you put a little water in the bottle? We all have a survival instinct. That’s how you embrace the ghetto within.”

The comedy in his set — and at this weekend’s Latin Comedy Jam — is universal, he says.

“Sometimes people ask if it’s going to be in English,” he says, sounding incredulous. “When Margaret Cho comes to town, no one wonders if you have to be Korean to attend.”

As Ernie’s career has evolved, so has his audience. He pulled back from playing clubs and focuses on corporate shows, concerts and educational events. For the past six years, he’s been the spokesman for the National Hispanic College Fund, so he spends a lot of time delivering his message of empowerment to high school students. During a recent trip to the state of Washington, he visited eight schools in a week.

His daytime message targeting students will be diluted during his gig at Wild Horse Pass. But, he says, it won’t be completely absent.

“I’m just as funny as I’ve ever been,” he says. “But even when I’m not doing the empowerment stuff, 90 percent of my jokes are still empowering, whether that’s the intention or not.”

Reach the reporter at randy.cordova@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8849. Twitter.com/randy_cordova.

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